Line-of-Business Applications

Client/server database technology is most widely used in line-of-business (LOB) applications…wherever and in whatever situation you require a data repository in which to store, retrieve, query and analyze information. These situations might be customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), marketing and sales support (from simple contact management to sophisticated list management), technical support (arguably a function of CRM), manufacturing, financial services, research, and so on.

LOB applications also are no longer about rows of characters. Any form of data should be stored and made retrievable from a database, including large graphics files, sound and visual material, documents, and so on.

We need 360-degree views of our worlds, and especially of our customers, and sophisticated database solutions give us that. Take CRM, for example: Information about a customer needs to be made available to everyone in the enterprise. And the data should be used to better serve the customers, meet their expectations, anticipate their needs, and be responsive to their demands. This not only means that you need to be able to store data in multiple forms, such as sound and documents, but that once data is stored, it continues to provide value for the space in the database it occupies.